Black and grey botanical tattoo of a berry branch with leaves and a conifer sprig along a forearm, shown with the arm extended outdoors.

Botanical branches on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pale forearm shows two botanical tattoos: a slender branch hanging with berries and seed pods, and a sprig of needle-like foliage with small berries near the elbow. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading on the berries and leaves. The arm is extended toward the left against a blurred grey street background, and a small number is tattooed between the two designs.

Botanical Forearm Branch Berry Leaves Sprig Foliage Seed pod Conifer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The yew at the bottom of Harrowgate churchyard had been dropping its red cups since Michaelmas, and I had been collecting them for three weeks before I admitted to myself why. My aunt Ottilie had kept a ledger of every seed she ever pressed, each one labelled in pencil on a strip of card, and when she died the ledger went to me with a note saying only: the number is the one you already know. I did not know it. I counted the strips and found twenty-three gaps, one for each year she had spent sending letters to a man in Tromsø who never wrote back.

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I took the branch of seed pods from her potting shed, the ones that hung like grey pearls from a thin stem, and laid it beside the sprig of conifer I had cut from the yew. Ottilie always said you could tell a family by what it kept alive in a hard winter. Her side kept the sprawling, untidy things. Ours kept the things that bore fruit in the dark.

On the last afternoon of October I posted the ledger to Tromsø with one strip missing, the twenty-third, folded inside the envelope with a single seed pod wrapped in tissue. The clerk at the counter asked whether I wanted it signed for. I said no. Some things, I had learned from her, arrive better when nobody is waiting at the door.